[Seeks-users] Negative feedback on personalized search results

[Emmanuel B. <ebe...@se...>]

Hi all,

recent work on the Seeks code base has added the long planned feature
of being able to reject unwanted search results.

One of Seeks' main objectives is to give users better control over
search algorithms and their results. Until now Seeks was learning
from users clicks and recommending some results among results returned
by conventional engines. This learning was 'passive', not
requiring any specific intervention from users.

This positive reinforcement was a first step towards better personalization
and sharing of experience and knowledge among users. But the lack of
negative feedback was blocking users from having a finer control 
over their results.

Seeks now implements a 'rejection' button next to any personalized
results. As a remainder personalized results are those using one
or more users' past clicks to boost up a result's ranking.
The 'rejection' button applies a negative feedback to both the 
result's URL and domain. It thus blocks the result from being
boosted up and from impacting other users' similar searches.

The negative feedback is overridden when the URL is being clicked.

In a not to distant future, not only personalized results, but all
results will be put under similar control.

These are preliminary steps before the introduction of a publishing
mecanismm allowing users to 'push' results they like to search
groups directly, and others to reject them.

The negative feedback button is to be released with the forthcoming
0.3.2 stable version of Seeks. Our experimental public node has been 
upgraded with the new code, http://www.seeks-project.info/search_exp.php

For developpers and testers, the feature is now part of
the 'experimental' of our git repository.

Em.